Digital Operations Group supports College marketing teams to increase student recruitment and retention. We do this by providing sectorwide data and presenting best practice offered on any of the 450 tertiary education websites we review.We have over 800 subscribers to our monthly newsletter and have been publishing sectorwide reports since November 2016. Originally the research was carried out as a programme to develop an understanding of the sector's offer and to better development the Havering College of Further & Higher Education website. Later, when looking at the level of development demonstrated across the sector, and taking into consideration the broade remit to provide vocational education, there was an obvious need for dissemination of data amongst the sector's digital practitioners and managers. UsWe are a small team of technical researchers based in Hackney, with one full-time employee and a string of freelancers. We have undertaken research projects in other sectors in including the social housing sector, international diplomatic sector, and local government sector. Despite our varied backgrounds, our focussed interest has been in the development of the tertiary education sector because of its critical role in developing the digital skills of the entire country. HistoryDigital Operations Group is a continuation of a three year programme begun as part of a research project back in 2013 at Birkbeck College. It started as part of the curriculum content of a community development project that taught adults of all abilities, traditions and levels of education, to build websites using the open source Joomla website CMS. It was reinitiated in 2016 as the Critical Friend website with a new focus specifically of Further Education, Sixth Form and Adult Education Colleges (FE/6F/AE). With monthly comparative studies of the Alexa traffic ranking of 450 websites, regular reviews of technical and content issues such as Apprenticeships, Staff Recruitment and Alumni Offers/Fundraising.
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Technical Reviews | Content Reviews | Outpost Reviews |
Website Operation Systems, 10 December 2017 | Enrichment Offer, 24 November 2017 | Wikipedia Articles, 2 July 2018 |
Corporate Logos, 19 February 2018 | Social Media (Home Page Links), 24 November 2017 | Facebook Logos, 15 March 2019 |
Staff Recruitment Systems, 20 April 2018 | Apprenticeships Offer, 9 January 2018 | Instagram Logos, 15 March 2019 |
SEO Formatting & Equality of Access, 8 February 2019 | Contact Us Pages, 20 April 2018 | LinkedIn Logos, 20 March 2019 |
Alumni Offer, 2 July 2018 | Twitter Logos, 21 March 2019 | |
Employers Offer, 25 July 2018 | YouTube Logos, 10 May 2019 | |
Libraries Offer, 1 August 2018 | ||
Principals & Chief Executive Officers, 3 September 2018 | ||
Open Events, 11 March 2019 | ||
Virtual Learning Environments, 5 August 2019 |
The biggest response by by people running Colleges and managing College websites has been to use reports for their own continuing professional development programmes and to provide inspiration for their own website development projects. Next has been to reach out for guidance and recommendations for contract developers and integrated systems such as live chat. From South Devon, Belfast, East Kent and Edinburgh direct feedback has been 99.8% positive. Two people have been unhappy about unflattering data and one person complained about copyright infringement, and was introduced to Section 30 of the 1988 Copyright, Designs & Patents Act.
The two important takeaways from these mapping exercises of tertiary education sector websites are positive and negative. The negative is the low level of development from base levels there has been and therefore the effectiveness of presenting data in tables as a prompt of even low/no cost, quick and simple improvements. The positive is that this is not universally true and that many Colleges are wholeheartedly using the data to initiate work-streams, to facilitate staff continuing professional development (CPD), and to populate formal digital skills curricula.
Consistent best website traffic performance is a great indicator of which College has the best strategy and is doing the best marketing and website operations. Outlier websites with unique best practices, where all other metrics are average, are incredible useful but can only be identified and lauded by comprehensive reviews. Imagination, initiative and ambition are found right across the sector. From micro Adult Education Colleges to grand College Groups, there are talented people, at all levels from Chief Executive to Apprentice that are developing new practices and are also open to learning and adopting new practices from wherever they present themselves.
Our hope and the purpose of this site is to make new practices available to every College leader and especially to every practitioner.
Jed KeenanJed has been an associate lecturer and teacher of adults of all abilities and traditions for over 6 years. He is a Digital Skills Specialist at Capel Manor College and before this has worked for Havering College of Further & Higher Education.Before taking up the post at Havering College Jed worked in television production, post production and transmission for 20 years and then switching careers by studying community development and public policy for 4 years at Birkbeck College. At Birkbeck he was elected the Birkbeck Students' Union Sabbatical Education Officer and practised by volunteering to teach website hosting, building, content production, audience building and performance monitoring to about 4,000 adults of all ages, all traditions and all abilities from around the world.Jed's favourite digital operations books are:
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020 8528 3135 | 079 5096 3069
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There are so many great opportunities to advance College services to current and future students, staff and stakeholders that without performance data and, more importantly, a full picture of the state of development sectorwide, it is very difficult to know how to begin the next uptick in service development. High quality online content and technical operation is straightforward to learn and maintain, and seeing it in practice enables College managers to build confidence in the service provision of service users, colleagues and funding providers.
Digital Operations Group was constituted in November 2018 to provide a knowledge base for digital practice to the public tertiary education sector. It is a continuation of sectorwide research into online technical operations and content production begun in 2013 as part of a research project while volunteering at Birkbeck College to teach adults of all abilities how to build Joomla based and cPanel hosted websites. It continued in 2016 as Critical Friend where the specialisation in Further Education, Sixth Form, and Adult Education Colleges started apace with monthly comparative studies of the Alexa traffic ranking of 450 websites. Previously this had been a selected basket of local Colleges to Havering College of Further & Higher Education used to longitudinally compare the effectiveness of digital, content and technical marketing, including Search Engine Optimisation of each local College's website.
Additionally to the traffic performance data, around full reviews of like for like website functions and offers began to be undertaken in mid-2017. Starting with People People People which showed that a fundamental disconnect existed between the needs of website visitors and the online service provision. It also showed exceptional examples of creative inventiveness ad technical initiative that showed performance levels that well surpassed exceptions. Alongside the data tables, we have been disseminating reports featuring best practice and top performers, and have included sectorwide metrics such as totals of College websites that are search engine optimised and comply with regulation.